This year marks the 20th anniversary of Eureka Street. To celebrate the anniversary, the journal presented a series of six video conversations with prominent contributors earlier in the year. This interview is the first in a second series to continue the celebration.
It's fitting that the interviewee is an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice, as, right from the start, these have been a prominent strands in the issues covered by Eureka Street. At the forefront has been the plight of refugees and asylum seekers, along with a raft of other issues, like Australia's involvement in developing countries, and in wars and conflicts around the globe.
Tony Kevin has written with verve and insight on all these topics. He began writing after retiring from a lengthy and distinguished career as a senior public servant and in the diplomatic corps. He worked for 30 years in the Prime Minister's Department and in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and served as Australia's ambassador to Poland (1991–94) and Cambodia (1994–97).
Kevin's life and career was strongly influenced by his parents. His Australian Irish-Catholic father, also a diplomat, met Kevin's mother in London before the outbreak of the Second World War. She was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, who'd escaped from Austria with her family at the time of the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March 1938.
Her family were secular Jews, and so Kevin grew up in Sydney in what he calls a 'fairly secular household'. In primary school he attended the Protestant Cranbrook School in Sydney's eastern suburbs, but every Saturday his father sent him to the Jesuits at Campion Hall for instruction in the Catholic faith. In high school he boarded at the Jesuits' St Ignatius College, Riverview.
Kevin studied engineering, and later economics and politics, at Trinity College, Dublin. Following this he began his long career in the Australian public service. In 1999 he married his wife Sina, a Cambodian woman he had met when he was ambassador there.
Since retirement he has been a prolific writer for a swag of magazines and newspapers. He's led debate on a range of issues; in one article written for the Canberra Times in March 2002, he coined the name SIEV-X for the asylum seeker vessel that sank the previous October, drowning all but 44 of its 397 passengers.
Kevin has written three books: A Certain Maritime Incident: the sinking of the